DARPA is looking to make huge strides in machine learning

Projects could help military experts predict troop movements and weather patterns DARPA christens Sea Hunter, an unmanned ocean-going vessel during a ceremony held in Portland, Oregon, on April 7, 2016. Credit: John Williams/DARPA The U.S. Defense Department’s research and development arm is offering to fund projects that will simplify the massively complex task of building models for machine learning applications. Models are a fundamental part of machine learning. Similar to algorithms, they help teach computers to, say, identify a cat in a photo, forecast weather from historical data or sort spam from legitimate email. But writing the models takes time and requires many skills. Typically, data scientists, subject matter experts and software engineers all have to come together to develop the model. When New York University researchers wanted to model block-by-block traffic…